GetMyUni is Helping Students Make the Right Education Choice

Founded in February 2015 by Hardik Thakkar and Upneet Grover, Bengaluru-based GetMyUni is an education hub which helps aspirants make the right education choice via student reviews and data insights. The startup enables them to get valuable industry experience via student challenges on a skill based hiring platform. It helps students during their complete lifecycle i.e from finding a college till graduation and beyond. The company also helps colleges to recruit the right students via its analytics driven recruitment and marketing solutions.

Hardik is an ESSEC Business School alumni and Upneet is an FMS graduate. Combined they have over 12 years of experience working in technology, strategy and marketing roles in Fortune 500 companies in India, France and the USA.

Story behind GetMyUni

While choosing their post-grad colleges, both Hardik and Upneet struggled to get relevant peer information and communicate with fellow students/alumni to understand the pros and cons of each college. “There was scattered information available on different forums and we mostly had to rely on our personal connections to get peer information” said Upneet.

To solve the aforementioned problems, both Hardik and Upneet quit their jobs in December 2014 and started their venture GetMyUni with Om Shanker, the tech lead at GetMyUni.

Key services of GetMyUni

GetMyUni aims to help students during their lifetime – from finding the right college to getting the right industry exposure via internships and fresher jobs. It helps students choose the right college with the help of following features:

Student Reviews: They can read the opinion of the students enrolled with the particular college. It provides over 25,000 student reviews from over 5,000 colleges across 7 different countries.

Data Insights: Students can obtain useful information like cut-offs, accommodation and hostel costs, placement opportunities and stipends transparently directly from their peers.

Student Networking Platform: Students can freely communicate with current/past students to get answers to all their queries and make an informed education choice.

How well is it doing?

GetMyUni has over 25,000 student reviews from over 5,000 colleges in 7 different countries. It has more than 30 clients so far which includes bigwigs like Zomato, BlaBlaCar, Times Internet, Grofers and many others.

The startup had raised a seed round from Times Internet and currently is focusing on building a scalable product.

Future plans

The startup aims to strengthen its position and establish themselves as a one stop solution for all student needs. It will be adding new products and verticals and are modeling on a US public listed educational hub Chegg.com.

Market size and market opportunity

Other portals which provide college information are Shiksha.com, Indiacollegesearch.com, Careers360.com and forums like Pagalguy also exist to help students take a prudent decision about their careers. Education in India is a big and booming market. By 2014 figures, India had over 35,000 colleges, 700 universities and a domestic student enrollment of 28 million. India is the second largest country to send students abroad – over 283,000 students left India in 2013 to study abroad.

Out of the 35,000 colleges, 60-70% of them engage in marketing activities to recruit students. Average annual marketing spend for these colleges is approx. $4,000-5,000. Thus the total market size ranges from $0.8 billion-1.2 billion.

The future of this market looks promising as the student enrollment figures are growing and a lot of private players (colleges) are entering the market (with higher budgets). The total fresher hiring/internship/live project market in India is around $300 million (based on 28 million enrolled students and 5.5 million graduates in 2014 of which 38% were employable).